Wishing it don’t make it so

Author Barbara Ehrenreich keeps questioning US business, social and psychological orthodoxies, especially in her latest book on the power of positive thinking: she doesn’t believe it has any power and tells us why

A few odd facts: George W Bush was head football cheerleader in his senior year at prep school. The total US market for “self-improvement products” in 2005 was estimated at $9.6bn (1). The most popular course offered by Harvard University in 2006 was positive psychology. Last month, during the Haitian earthquake, the top international story on happynews.com (which publishes only good news) was “Prince William attracts crowd in New Zealand”. There are at least four different species of breast cancer awareness teddy bears. Sales of the self-help book The Secret (“the secret gives you anything you want: happiness, health and wealth”) by former Melbourne TV producer Rhonda Byrne, published in 2006, exceed seven million.

In isolation, each of these facts may cause no more than mild disquiet, a sense that the harsher realities of life are being brushed aside. In fact, as US journalist and campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich has discovered, they are all manifestations of the ubiquity of positive thinking in the United States. When she began to put the pieces together, they revealed a nation in the grip of a collective delusion that does damage to people’s lives all the way from corporate boardrooms to those struggling with house repossessions and poverty.

I met Barbara Ehrenreich last month at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. She made a flying visit to the city on a three-day tour of the British Isles that also took in London, Dublin and Edinburgh. In Bristol, despite the falling snow, a good crowd turned out to hear her message: positive thinking has duped America into a collective delusion and is now spreading its pernicious tentacles around the world. It’s an argument that Ehrenreich sets out wittily and compellingly in her latest book, Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (2), her 17th in a writing career spanning more than four decades.

Positive can be negative

Many people furrow their brows when they encounter her thesis that positive thinking has bad effects. How can being positive be negative? Ehrenreich herself admits that it took her some time to see the connections between positive thinking and America’s ills. In her case, it was the experience of breast cancer that was the catalyst. After her diagnosis in 2000, she became increasingly shocked at the orthodox view that you had to be positive about your cancer, view it as a rite of passage rather than something to rail at. In its most extreme form, the view was even that cancer was a gift, a chance for “creative self-transformation”.

Ehrenreich, who has a long-standing interest in health politics, and in particular the health system’s treatment of women, was especially troubled by two aspects of this. First, the attitude seemed to be mandatory. When she posted some angry thoughts about her treatment and “sappy pink ribbons” on a cancer sufferers’ online message board, she received a chorus of rebukes from fellow sufferers – dissent wasn’t welcome. And second, by thrusting responsibility for the outcome of the disease squarely at the patient, a host of other problems are consigned to the background, such as “why we have an epidemic of a disease and we don’t even know what causes it; why the treatments are so ineffective and barbaric and debilitating”. Ehrenreich has no time for claims (which have gained widespread credence) that a positive attitude can affect the outcome of cancer: “I felt very vindicated when studies came out in the last two years really throwing this out, showing there didn’t seem to be any effect of attitude on cancer survival rates”. She likewise believes that claims for other health benefits of going through life as an irrepressible sunbeam, such as greater life expectancy, are highly dubious and often based on methodologically flawed studies.

The problem with positive thinking is not so much that it’s positive as that it is merely thinking. As The Secret explains: “Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life… It’s what you are thinking.” The “secret” is the law of attraction, supposedly a cosmic, sempiternal law. It promulgates a view of a universe in which you can have whatever you want as long as you want it badly enough. Even God can be pressed into service in order for you to achieve your desires. As televangelist Joyce Meyer put it: “I believe God wants to give us nice things” (3). For positive thinkers, the universe resembles a big mail-order department. Submit your order clearly, and it’ll be fulfilled.

All this may seem like no more than harmless self-deluded nonsense, but implicit political assumptions underlie the positive thinking creed. If your thoughts determine your fortunes, then it follows that those who find themselves in poverty are simply not trying hard enough. Positive people get jobs. Negative people get fired. In the words of one motivational speaker, “Negative People SUCK!” Positive thinking is an expression of the most strident individualism and wants no truck with the common good or collective endeavour. If bad things happen to you, too bad – it’s your own fault.

Perhaps the most eye-opening chapter in Ehrenreich’s book is the one in which she reveals how positive thinking gained a foothold in the corporate world. She charts the shift from management as a dull, quasi-scientific discipline to the new messianic, anti-rational brand of leadership, in which business leaders are pumped up with confidence in their own ability to take the right decision based on hunches and intuitions. She quotes business guru Tom Peters in the 1990s: “Things are moving too fast for us to sort out logically what’s going on.” And in that atmosphere of ebullient self-confidence, Ehrenreich argues, were sown the seeds of the financial meltdown. Anyone who was critical or unable to “get with the plan”, was got rid of, until there were no canaries left in the mine.

Mystical currents

Where did the positive thinking movement come from? Ehrenreich traces it back to the mid-19th century and sees it as a reaction to the oppressive weight of Calvinism’s “socially imposed depression”. Proponents of the so-called New Thought, a heady brew of eastern and western mystical currents, fought their way free of the confinement of dour, deterministic Calvinism and championed a belief in the ability of individuals to influence the world around them purely through the power of thought.

Paradoxically, while loosening the iron grip of Calvinism on benighted souls, early positive thinking nonetheless preserved some of its rigours: “A harsh judgmentalism, echoing the old religion’s condemnation of sin, and an insistence on the constant interior labour of self-examination”. That harsh emphasis on our responsibility for our own misfortunes persists today.

Ehrenreich herself experienced some of the rigours of Calvinism as a child, albeit in a “diluted and non-ethical form”, imported to the new world from Scotland by her ancestors (she is Ehrenreich by marriage, Alexander by birth). “My great-grandparents ended up raising my mother, and although she rebelled against her Presbyterian heritage in many ways… she preserved some of its lineaments in our home. Displays of emotion, including smiling were denounced as ‘affected’, and tears were an invitation to slaps. Work was the only known antidote for psychic malaise.”

This left Ehrenreich with at least a partial sympathy for some of the strengths of the Protestant ethic, such as self-discipline. This can have amusing consequences at times. She explains that when she takes a test to measure her happiness level and comes to the question asking her to rate herself on a scale ranging from “I am extremely proud of myself” to “I am ashamed of myself”, she rejects the entire premise of the question. After all, she says decisively, “pride is a sin”.

Deep immersion

Brightsided might be seen as the third panel in an Ehrenreich triptych, begun with Nickel and Dimed and continued with Bait and Switch. In Nickel and Dimed she went undercover in low-wage America in order to reveal how difficult it was for America’s poor to get by, even when they were working several jobs. The book was rapturously received and went on to become an international bestseller.

She candidly admits that before she wrote it she didn’t know much about immersion journalism. “All I had read was Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. I wasn’t even aware that this kind of journalism had a name.” She says she prefers the immersion method to building up a story through conventional interviews, especially when interviewees are simply used to provide apposite soundbites. The immersive method, she says, gives the writer the opportunity to experience things from the inside, to find things out the hard way. In the case of Nickel and Dimed, she suspects her stoical co-workers would probably never have thought to mention how physically and mentally exhausting their jobs were; they were too busy getting on with them. So “for me, a strong woman who had spent a long time in the gym to find that her legs were like rubber at the end of a shift, that was a lesson.”

Going undercover also allowed Ehrenreich’s sharp eye for humour to find deserving targets. Here she is on one of her erstwhile employers from her cleaning days: “I am vacuuming the home of a retired couple and happen to look into a room I’ve completed, where I see the female owner’s enormous purple-encased butt staring up at me from the floor. I wouldn’t have thought she was agile enough, but she’s climbed under a desk to search out particles of overlooked dust.”

As so often in Ehrenreich, there is a serious point just below the surface. Her employers forbade even the drinking of a glass of water while on cleaning duty, even in 95°F temperatures, but were on the look-out for the slightest slip-up on the part of their workforce. It was symptomatic of a widespread tendency to dehumanise the low-paid workforce that she encountered.

Aware that white-collar workers were increasingly suffering the same poor treatment as their blue-collar counterparts, in 2005 she published Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. This time, her plans to go undercover in a white-collar job came to naught; despite months of trying, she failed to get a single job offer. But the world of career coaches and motivational seminars she reveals in the book would go on to become part of the bigger picture in Brightsided.

Making a difference

She says her main aim in writing these books is to effect change. Following Bait and Switch, she co-founded United Professionals, a support and advocacy group that campaigns for health reform and unemployment benefits (4). In the case of Brightsided, it seems that her questioning the ethos of positive thinking in public has come as a relief to many: “So many people have written and said more or less ‘Thank God! I thought I was crazy’. They describe how they lost a job because they were ‘negative’, how they watched a spouse die while desperately trying to improve their attitude so that they would live. The book seems to affirm a lot of people, so that’s good – that’s step one. My biggest message in life is ‘It’s not your fault’.”

She was asked in Bristol if the election campaign for Obama was not a vindication for the power of positive thinking. She riposted: “We weren’t sure he would win. We were determined. When the founding fathers of America, signed the declaration of independence, they had no reason to think that they could beat England. They knew furthermore that by signing the declaration each of them became potentially guilty of treason against the crown and punishable by execution. But they didn’t just sit there and say we must beam out independence-style thoughts into the universe until it comes to us. ‘Yes we can’ is very different from ‘yes I can’.”

Ehrenreich, who wrote a history of collective joy (5), is far from a miserablist who thinks that there’s nothing we can do to improve the world, though. She may be against positive thinking, but she’s all for positive action. “Things can be done. I’m all for a can-do attitude. We have a massive can’t-do attitude in the US.” And then, having signed some copies of her book, she was off again into the snow, to spread the message of the futility of the American dream.

(1) Marketdata Enterprises enters the caveat that “information about the market and its privately owned competitors is still very difficult to obtain. Most companies or organisations are very reluctant to give out any [financial] information”.

(2) Metropolitan Books, New York, 2009. In the UK, it’s entitled rather more bluntly Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World (Granta Books, 2010).

(3) Quoted in David Van Biema and Jeff Chu, “Does God want you to be rich?”, Time, 18 September 2006.